Cindy: Mystery Month is coming to Booklist in May. It’s an annual event and we can’t wait! Bookends has some special posts planned and Booklist magazine and Booklist Online will have more mystery fun than Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys combined. You’ll want to grab your magnifying glass and keep a close eye on all the features!

Two weeks ago one of my sixth grade teachers assigned mysteries to her students and I booktalked for six hours to her classes. I am hoping that we can share some of the students’ responses here on Bookends next month. I have stacks of interesting mysteries piled around me including one that just arrived yesterday, In Too Deep (Hyperion, July 2013) by Coert Voorhees. It looks a little frightening to this recently certified scuba diver but I’m still eager to read it. I’ll let you know what I think during Mystery Month.

The mystery I am waiting to be solved tonight, though, is what Lynn and her fellow jury members (Angelina Benedetti and Rollie Welch) picked as the YA Literature winner of the L.A. Times Book Prizes. The award ceremony should be underway as I type this. Stay tuned.

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Cindy Dobrez and Lynn Rutan are Booklist reviewers and middle-school librarians who have chaired both ALA’s Best Books for Young Adults and the Michael L. Printz Award for YA Literature committees. Follow Bookends on Twitter at @BookendsBlog. You can also find Cindy at @cdobrez and Lynn at @482april.

Cindy: Please wash your hands before you read this post! Measles, whooping cough, and now an outbreak of typhus … in youth literature, that is! A few years ago, Lynn and I posted about a fictional Typhoid Mary story, Deadly (2011) by Julie Chibbaro, and I was intrigued about Mary Mallon and her real story. This year […]

Lynn: Renowned author Paul Fleischman is a man on a mission. He wants teens to look beyond their own “internal movie,” beyond the dazzling technological changes in our world to the side effects and huge environmental problems we face. Using in-your-face, blunt language in Eyes Wide Open: Going Beyond the Environmental Headlines (2014), Fleischman sets about […]

Lynn: As an educator, a parent, and a grandparent, one of my goals has been to fan the flames of curiosity in kids. It’s a critical trait and one that often seems to get squashed somewhere along the K-12 march. I love books that encourage kids to ask questions. Marc Aronson’s books always seem to […]

Cindy: Please wash your hands before you read this post! Measles, whooping cough, and now an outbreak of typhus … in youth literature, that is! A few years ago, Lynn and I posted about a fictional Typhoid Mary story, Deadly (2011) by Julie Chibbaro, and I was intrigued about Mary Mallon and her real story. This year […]

Lynn: Renowned author Paul Fleischman is a man on a mission. He wants teens to look beyond their own “internal movie,” beyond the dazzling technological changes in our world to the side effects and huge environmental problems we face. Using in-your-face, blunt language in Eyes Wide Open: Going Beyond the Environmental Headlines (2014), Fleischman sets about […]

Lynn: As an educator, a parent, and a grandparent, one of my goals has been to fan the flames of curiosity in kids. It’s a critical trait and one that often seems to get squashed somewhere along the K-12 march. I love books that encourage kids to ask questions. Marc Aronson’s books always seem to […]